Butcher's Moon

But what difference did it make who owned the place, so long as it was fun to go? And for the older male patrons, Tony Florio was still a recognizable name, and to shake his hand was a pleasure of a kind not often available in a backwater like Tyler.

When Dalesia and Hurley and Mackey walked in, Florio looked them over from his casual spot near the headwaiter and did a saloonkeeper’s rapid fix on them: They were strangers, new to this place. They didn’t give the impression of being local citizens, so they were more likely to be traveling men, passing through town and wanting an evening’s entertainment. They would have a few hundred on them, but they would neither make nor break the bank. It was possible that a cabdriver in town had steered them out here for a late dinner in the main dining room —called, obscurely, The Spa—but not likely. They were definitely not the type for The Corral, where younger local couples danced to the rock music of The Heat Exchange. Were they for upstairs? If so, they would have a card with them, from one of the six desk clerks, nine bartenders, and seven cabdrivers in town whose judgment Florio trusted.

And when Florio stepped forward to give them a glad hello, it turned out they did have a card, but the source of it was a surprise. Looking at the familiar name in the familiar handwriting on the familiar business card, Florio said, “Ah hah.” He looked up, reassessing these three, saying, “So you know Frankie Faran, do you?”

“From good old union days,” Ed Mackey said, and gave Florio a tight hard grin.

Florio recognized that grin, and that kind of man. It was the sort of expression you found sometimes with professional sparring partners, guys whose goal in life was to prove they could take more without flinching than anybody else in the world. Men like that were dangerous because they almost always wanted to test themselves against somebody or other, but once you knew how to handle them, they were babes in the woods. This one would throw away his last dime upstairs, given the opportunity.

So let’s give him the opportunity. “Well, any friend of Frank’s,” Florio said. “Would you boys care for a drink before dinner?” Then, when he saw them glancing off to their left at the entrance to the bar—called The Salon—he gave them a big smile and said, “Not in there. Private.” He turned and gestured to a waiter who wasn’t a waiter, but whose job it was to escort customers who weren’t going to The Salon or The Spa or The Corral, and when the waiter came briskly over, Florio said, “Show these gents to my office, will you, Angy?” And to the three men he said, “I’ll be along in just a minute.”

“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Florio,” Nick Dalesia said, and the other two nodded, with slightly belligerent smiles on their faces.

In the dining room, Mike Carlow and Stan Devers and Dan Wycza were eating a late supper of omelette or steak tartare. Carlow was seated so he could see the main entrance, where the exchange between Florio and the other three had taken place, and now he said, “Well, they’re in.” Neither of the others said anything or looked around from their food, and after the one comment Carlow, too, went back to eating.

* * *

Wiss and Elkins left the Pontiac—their own car—on a side street, and walked down London Avenue past the darkened windows of the closed shops toward the Mature Art Theater, a block and a half away. It was twenty to twelve; London Avenue was deserted. The last show at the Mature Art had let out fifteen minutes ago, a couple of dozen hunch-shouldered men who had wandered off in separate directions, none of them looking as though they’d had much of a good time. Now the sidewalks were empty of pedestrians, the street empty of traffic. Night lights shone in the interiors of stores, the sodium arc streetlights spread their bright pink glow on silence and inactivity, and the sky was as black as the velvet in a jeweler’s window display.

Wiss carried a small black leather bag with a brass catch, like the bags doctors carried in the days when they made house calls. Elkins strolled with his hands in his pockets, looking constantly left and right, far ahead, back over his shoulder. They moved along like a pair of workers off a night shift somewhere, and when they reached the Mature Art Theater they stopped and looked at the posters.

A double feature was playing currently at the Mature Art: Man Hungry and Passion Doll. The posters featured black-and-white photos of slightly overweight girls in their underwear kneeling on beds or pulling one another’s hair or kissing one another or cowering with arms raised self-protectively in overlit corners of bare rooms.

There were four glass doors leading to the theater lobby, but three of them featured red arrows pointing toward the fourth. Just inside that fourth door a chrome railing led the customer past the cashier’s window, where money was paid but no ticket was given. By eliminating tickets, the management—Dutch Buenadella—found it possible to lie to everyone about the number of paying customers who had seen the show.

There were strong advantages in being able to lie about the size of the audience. Tonight, for instance, a typical Monday night—a slow night generally for dirty movies—one hundred eighteen people had paid five dollars apiece to see the show. Of each five dollars, not quite one dollar was due the city and the state in sales and other taxes, a dollar-sixty was to be turned over to the distributor of the movies for their rental, and another fraction was to be paid the projectionists’ and ushers’ unions for their pension funds; leaving about two-forty out of each five dollars for the owner of the theater, before overhead. But the books for tonight would show that eighty-seven people had paid to see the double feature, meaning that thirty-one people, paying one hundred fifty-five dollars, had not been counted. Which meant that eighty dollars and sixty cents would not be paid the city, the state, the distributor, and the pension funds, and that next March the remaining seventy-seven dollars and fifty cents would not be declared as part of the corporation’s income for tax purposes.

For Dutch Buenadella, this potentiality of lying had an additional advantage. He wasn’t alone in this operation, he had partners. The entire local organization was an interlocking board of directors, so that a piece of Buenadella’s skim eventually wound up in Al Lozini’s pocket, and another piece in Ernie Dulare’s pocket, and another piece in Frank Schroder’s pocket. These partners of his knew he was lying to the tax people and the union people and the distributor, so he couldn’t very well tell them he’d only had eighty-seven customers tonight. But he could say he’d had one hundred eleven. He could keep not two but three sets of books, and on top of the normal skim, take an extra thirty-five dollars directly for himself. Every night of the year. Which meant something like thirteen thousand tax-free dollars a year for himself, personally.

Frank Faran hadn’t known about the extra skim, which Buenadella took home in his pocket every night and put away in a wall safe in his den, but he did know about the regular skim and what happened to it, so now Wiss and Elkins knew about it too. And Wiss, looking to his left toward the nearest glass door while continuing to face the movie posters, murmured, “All we got to do is breathe on that door.”

“Not before twelve o’clock,” Elkins said. Glancing at his watch, he said, “Two minutes from now.”

* * *

The cables, sheathed in heavy iron pipe, ran through the sewer system, crisscrossing beneath the downtown area, London Avenue, and all the business side streets. Feeder cables branched out from the main lines, burrowing through dirt under sidewalks and into basements, culminating at metal boxes that looked as though they might contain fuses, and from which wires led up to all the doors and windows of the participating business